In the last decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come roaring out of high-tech labs to become something that people use every day without even realizing it. In addition to powering numerous apps and other digital products, AI stands to benefit all industries, including supply chain and logistics. In fact, lots of companies have already benefited from AI investments. According to the Teradata report, State of Artificial Intelligence for Enterprises, Supply Chain and Operations was one of the top areas where businesses are driving revenue from AI investment. With the volumes of data in supply chains and logistics growing every day, the need for more sophisticated processing solutions is becoming more urgent.

Giving rise to a new class of intelligent logistics assets and operational paradigms, DHL and IBM in their joint report "Artificial Intelligence in Logistics" outline how supply chain leaders can take advantage of AI's key benefits and opportunities now that performance, accessibility as well as costs are more favorable than ever before. The collaborative report identifies implications and uses cases of AI for the logistics industry, finding that AI has the potential to significantly augment human capabilities. While AI is already ubiquitous in the consumer realm, as demonstrated by the rapid growth of voice assistant applications, DHL and IBM find that AI technologies are maturing at a great pace, allowing for additional applications for the logistics industry. These can, for instance, help logistics providers enrich customer experiences through conversational engagement and even deliver articles before the customer has even ordered them. "Today's current technology, business, and societal conditions favor a paradigm shift to proactive and predictive logistics operations more than any previous time in history" explains Matthias Heutger, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Innovation DHL.

This month the McKinsey Global Institute released a discussion paper called "Notes from the AI Frontier: Insights from Hundreds of Use Cases" that measures the recent progress of artificial intelligence business applications and identifies industries and use cases where AI has the greatest potential to unlock value. There are a number of different'problem types' identified by the analysts, each of which are suited to particular deep learning or AI techniques. These problem types include classification (based on a set of training data, categorizing new inputs as belong to one of a set of categories), continuous estimation (based on a set of training data, estimate the next numeric value in a sequence), clustering (a system creates a set of categories for which individual data instances have a set of common or similar characteristics), optimization, anomaly detection, ranking, recommendations, and data generation. The two most important takeaways are that the best AI systems have consistently outperformed humans since 2015, and specifically in the transport and logistics industry, AI can improve performance over other analytics techniques by 89%. In other words, the technology is maturing and becoming commercially viable, and transportation and logistics stands to gain more from AI than almost any other industry.

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In a joint report, DHL, the world's leading logistics service provider, and IBM have evaluated the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in logistics and exposed how it can be best applied to transform the industry, giving rise to a new class of intelligent logistics assets and operational paradigms. DHL and IBM outline how supply chain leaders can take advantage of AI's key benefits and opportunities now that performance, accessibility as well as costs are more favourable than ever before. The collaborative report identifies implications and use cases of AI for the logistics industry, finding that AI has the potential to significantly augment human capabilities. While AI is already ubiquitous in the consumer realm, as demonstrated by the rapid growth of voice assistant applications, DHL and IBM find that AI technologies are maturing at great pace, allowing for additional applications for the logistics industry. These can, for instance, help logistics providers enrich customer experiences through conversational engagement and even deliver articles before the customer has even ordered them.

In a joint report, DHL and IBM have evaluated the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in logistics and exposed how it can be best applied to transform the industry, giving rise to a new class of intelligent logistics assets and operational paradigms. DHL and IBM outline how supply chain leaders can take advantage of AI's key benefits and opportunities now that performance, accessibility as well as costs are more favourable than ever before. The collaborative report identifies implications and use cases of AI for the logistics industry, finding that AI has the potential to significantly augment human capabilities. While AI is already ubiquitous in the consumer realm, as demonstrated by the rapid growth of voice assistant applications, DHL and IBM find that AI technologies are maturing at great pace, allowing for additional applications for the logistics industry. These can, for instance, help logistics providers enrich customer experiences through conversational engagement and even deliver articles before the customer has even ordered them.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will see the global logistics industry shift its operating model from being reactive to being proactive and predictive. Big Data, self-learning systems and the monitoring of social media will enable logistics providers to be better prepared for rapid consumer demand, such as that which saw an estimated 38,000 tonnes of fidget spinners transported by air last year. A joint report by DHL and IBM, Artificial Intelligence in Logistics, has evaluated the potential of AI and shown how it can to transform the logistics industry, giving rise to a "new class of intelligent logistics assets and operational paradigms". While AI is already established in the consumer arena, as demonstrated by the rapid growth of voice assistant applications, DHL and IBM found that AI technologies are "maturing at great pace," allowing for additional applications for the logistics industry. "Today's current technology, business, and societal conditions favour a paradigm shift to proactive and predictive logistics operations more than any previous time in history" explained Matthias Heutger, senior vice president and global head of innovation at DHL. "As the technological progress in the field of AI is proceeding at great pace, we see it as our duty to explore, together with our customers and employees, how AI will shape the logistics industry's future."